PAGE 1 (MIGHTY REAL) (MIGHTY REAL) WORK ON PAPER FOR WORK ONPAPER PATTEN AS MARY SELF-PORTRAIT WHITEWALLS, 1994 THE WORK OF ROBERT BLANCHON YOU MAKE ME FEEL (MIGHTY REAL) THE WORK OF ROBERT BLANCHON NOVEMBER 19, 2009 – FEBRUARY 26, 2010 TRACEY/BARRY GALLERY, BOBST LIBRARY NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PAGE 10 YOU MAKE ME FEEL FOREWORD ) Queer. If I had to use one word to describe Robert Blanchon’s work, it’s queer. I don’t mean queer only in the sense that he was a man who loved other men, though his sex- uality is an integral part of his art; but rather, that he has a queer approach to the world. He sees things askew, askance, catty-corner—perverse in the epistemological MIGHTY REAL ( sense. Thoroughly postmodern in his approach, Blanchon is a profound prankster. All structures of culture and art, bodies and desire are fodder for his parodies. At the moment we engage his vision, we stand in that liminal, fl eeting space of the queer. I fi rst encountered Blanchon’s work when Mary Ellen Carroll, executor of the Blanchon estate, contacted me about the possibility of placing Robert’s papers here in the Fales Library. Fales is the primary special collection for literature and the arts at New York University. Over the past fi fteen years, we have become a leading repository for the work of New York artists from the 1970s-1990s who worked in downtown New York and who directly engaged critical theo- ry in their art practices. Blanchon’s work fi ts perfectly with that of artists such as Dennis Cooper, Richard Foreman, Gary Indiana, Frank Moore, Lynne Tillman, and David Wojnarowicz—all of whose papers are at the library. I am extremely grateful to Mary Ellen Caroll for donating the Blanchon papers to NYU. Before they arrived at Fales, the papers were in the steward- ship of Amy Sadao and Nelson Santos of Visual AIDS. Through the Frank Moore Archive Project and the Robert Blanchon Estate Project, Visual AIDS processed, preserved, and published Blanchon’s work, keeping it alive. I am indebted to their care of the collection. This exhibition is the fi rst showing of the breadth of Robert Blanchon’s “work.” The word is apt; each of his projects has “work” to do, and makes us “work” to under- stand it. I am thankful for the excellent curatorship of Sasha Archibald, Tania Duvergne, and Bethany Martin-Breen who organized this exhibition. It is an honor and privilege for the Fales Library to preserve and provide access to Robert Blanchon’s papers and artwork, and to present this exhibition. MARVIN J. TAYLOR DIRECTOR, FALES LIBRARY AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS NEW YORK UNIVERSITY The Fales Library and Special Collections are the primary repository for rare materials in literature and the arts at New York University. The collection holds more than 200,000 printed books, 12,000 linear feet of archives and manuscripts, and more than 50,000 media elements. In addition to the Fales Collection, which documents developments in prose narrative, the Downtown Collection documents the New York art scene from the 1970s-1990s. Our Food Studies collection contains more than 20,000 volumes, making it one of the largest in the country. For more information please see www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/fales/. ABOUT VISUAL AIDS Since 1988, Visual AIDS has been producing exhibitions, publications, and events utilizing visual art to effect change in the fi ght against AIDS. As one of the fi rst national initiatives to respond to the AIDS pandemic, Visual AIDS projects like The [Red] Ribbon Project and Day Without Art helped the arts community lead the way in AIDS activism. Through the Frank Moore Archive Project, Visual AIDS maintains a visual record of the pandemic and the MUSCLE BIKERS MUSCLE contributions of artists affected by AIDS while providing services enabling many artists to continue their work and further their careers. For more information, visit www. visualAIDS.org. Visual AIDS thanks Art Matters and Blue Medium for their support of the exhibition and publication. PAGE 3 CURATORS’ STATEMENT The Robert Blanchon Papers at NYU’s Fales Library include several proposals for unrealized artworks. One of these describes photographs of architect Mies van der Rohe’s Modernist icons stretched between two large sheets of Plexiglas. The Plexi would be bound on all sides with black tape, to make an object that MAKE ME FEEL YOU looked like a giant antiquated slide. (In fact, Blanchon owned sev- eral such slides, also in the Fales collection.) The proposal— to make a reproduction of an icon into an artwork that alludes to reproduction—neatly summarizes Blanchon’s attitude toward artmaking, and his clever use of source material to complicate his role as artist. Subtle but incisive, this proposal suggests the direction we might have expected Blanchon to take. A conceptual artist who worked primarily in photography and sculpture, Blanchon’s artistic career spans just over a decade. Born in 1965, and having lived in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, Blanchon died of AIDS in 1999. Despite his short career, his work comprises an eloquent take on a few major themes: queer sexuality; memory, loss, and nostalgia; the politi- UNTITLED (SELF-PORTRAIT), 1991 (DETAILS) cized body; and the effects of his illness. In tandem with PENCIL, CRAYON ON PAPER DIMENSIONS VARIABLE each of these topics, Blanchon’s oeuvre is also an extended effort COLLECTION OF PETER NORTON to destabilize traditional notions of authorship. On the one hand, Blanchon insistently, and sometimes outrageously, appropriated from other artists and visual culture, and on the other, he treated identity as a matter of perception, rather than a self-defi ned fact. Such themes refl ect Blanchon’s 1990s milieu, a time of great upheaval in the art world and the culture industry at large. A voracious consumer of high and low culture, Blanchon was engaged with the era’s critical theory, popular culture, fash- ion, architecture, and politics. In New York, where Blanchon arrived in 1990, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, known as ACT UP, was in full swing, holding protests and “kiss-ins.” Blanchon was involved, as was most of the art world. He had a studio on Canal Street near Artists Space and was employed at the New Museum, which was exhibiting controversial work by Mary Kelly, Andres Serrano, and group shows like Marcia Tucker’s infamous “Bad Girls.” The word “queer” was emerging as a sex-positive embrace of fl uid sexuality, and women and artists of color were slowly making inroads in the art world. Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989, Keith Haring in 1990, and David Wojnarowicz in 1992. Like these artists, Blanchon was deeply invested in radical queer culture. Unlike these artists, however, or at least their best-known work, Blanchon’s style is subtle, wry, and exemplary of the mini- malist gesture. His artistic approach was informed by two major trends: the Picture Generation’s strategies of appropriation, and the agitprop tactics of the AIDS movement. Blanchon UNTITLED (EYE FRAME), 1998 was not an agitprop artist, but like such artists, he boldly used PRESCRIPTION EYEGLASS, CUSTOM FRAME, GLASS SHELF 2 X 9 X 10 INCHES appropriation as a means to an end. His was a parasitical art practice—a mode of artmaking that freely quoted sources as diverse as Duchamp’s Étant donnés, the Anita Hill hearings, a medieval burial ritual, and the work of his contemporaries. Appropriation risks being derivative, but in Blanchon’s case, it served to perfectly isolate the ingeniousness of his own quiet but salient intervention. His artworks have sources traceable and untraceable. He took specifi c motifs from work by Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Martin Kippenberger, Joseph Kosuth, James Welling, and others; a silver cast of his decaying teeth seems uneasily related to body casts by Kiki Smith. Among an homage to Tony Tasset and a per- formed parody of Gilbert and George (with Mary Ellen Carroll) are photos of Los Angeles carports—images that reference Dan Graham’s photos of suburban homes and Ed Ruscha’s UNTITLED (DRAWING HORSE), 1998 gas stations, though Blanchon tints his images and paints .25 INCH TEMPERED GLASS, SILICONE ADHESIVE the frames to match as a reminder that even the most detached 60 X 30 X 30 INCHES GILBERT AND GEORGE, 1994 ESTATE OF ROBERT BLANCHONGELATIN SILVER PRINT, SILVER LEAF FRAME of documentary traditions is “framed” by its author. 42.5 X 32.5 INCHES PAGE 8 In other cases, Blanchon’s quoting is less explicit. He riffs ) on Minimalism’s seriality by using solitary photographs of trees, waves, and fl owers to suggest fecundity rather than formalism. Untitled (drawing horse) is a fl awless statement on the vulnerability of the artist and a sculpture that bears little resemblance to any other, but Blanchon describes it in his correspondence as a “painful MIGHTY REAL ( homage to feeling too minimal lately and hating the big guns,” by which he meant Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt. Contemporary art wasn’t Blanchon’s only source material. He also found inspiration in the visual culture of gay sex: pulp erotica, want ads, and advertisements, toward which he positioned himself as an archivist of sorts, though an archivist with a slight fetish attachment. The images that comprise Untitled (aroma/1981) are not sex ads themselves, but sepia prints, while the bandana series— bandanas of the sort used to indicate gay sex preferences—are enlarged and beautifully hand-tinted. His fetishizing impulse is tender; he infuses these signs of sex with love. Nor did Blanchon hesitate to mine his personal life.